I was recently invited by Maiike Van Neck to plot a typographic workshop for 50 Graphic Design Students at Ravensbourne College in London.

I asked the students to take advantage of their critical mass, and of the large open-space building of Ravensbourne, which offers a birds-eye view from 4 stories.

The students slipped into white overalls for uniformity and contrast on the dark floor, and worked in groups, each team art-directing the rest of the small crowd to perform their idea of human typography. Some used the individuals as pixels, others had a go exploring motion blur, while others organised a human chain that could be choreographed to elegantly (and efficiently!) merge from one letterform to the next.

Want to protest? Tell a story? We are looking for between 10-15 volunteers to join us for a performative typographic workshop at the Gerald Moore gallery on Sunday August the 12th. Working with the body’s potential to form new words through movement and gesture, it will be your chance to take part in a living work of art.

I will be leading a three hour workshop and participants will be invited to work together to create a collaborative public performance on the day.

Sunday 12th August 2012
12-5pm

Workshop, 12th of August 2012

We want people to bring ideas along and work together as a group. It will be a fun day, and we will provide lunch and refreshments as well as a souvenir.

The workshop curated by George Vasey
Summer School is curated by Rosie Cooper and realised by Fay Nicolson

This picture of human arabic typography, reading تضاريس/Relief/Tadariss, was taken on the first day of a seminar on 3D typography I gave at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Beirut, Lebanon.

Working with Masters students in Art Direction and Multimedia, we a created choreography-based pluri-alphabetic piece allowing a group of people posing as human letterforms to express a word in English, then in French, and finally in Arabic in a few moves, reflecting on the Lebanese multi-lingual culture.

For Clerkenwell Design Week 2011 DesignMarketo is setting up at the Farmiloe Building on St John Street in collaboration with the Barbican Art Centre. I will be giving a (free) workshop based on stop motion and typography, using the iconic building space as a grid to produce a human typeface.
Wednesday 25.05.11 from 2-4pm

I was also part of the 2010 edition of the Emerge show during London Design Week.
During the opening, guests were invited to pose as human letterforms/numbers
and were given a polaroid of their mini-performance (instant typography deserves
instant photography, doesn’t it?).

“All is flux, nothing stays still, no man ever steps twice in the same river“, observed Heraclites.
This intelligent (because human) letterform allows a message to change from an instant to another, in an attempt to reflect on the fleeting quality of the moment.
It is flexible enough to keep the message relevant and up to date as its context changes, but also has the visual presence of a giant billboard.

In this phase of the project, ephemeral typography is used to induce people to feel the weight of passing time,
with its flow symbolically interrupted by halting the traffic.
This typographic performance was only recorded by taking screenshots of the images transmitted by a public webcam (showing the iconic Abbey Road crossing) onto a computer.

As this medium displays one “real-time” image every 4 seconds, a fraction of second seems to be extended
for the length of time necessary for the image to be refreshed.
Using a public webcam to display a message also considerably broadens its audience.